Contact Akamai who recently bought the DDOS mitigation service Prolexic. They may be able to mitigate the attack and save you bandwidth costs.
Alternatively, call CloudFlare.
Don't just absorb this through Amazon.
We are under attack
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Re: We are under attack
#12First a 2.6bn request/hour DDoS and then making the front page of HN... talk about getting flooded with requests.
Hopefully making the front page will at least get them the attention of Amazon or enough donations to cover the temporarily (absurdly) high operating cost.
Re: We are under attack
#13[deleted]
Re: We are under attack
#14> Because of the number of requests we are receiving, our bandwidth costs have shot up to USD $30,000 per day. Perhaps the US State Department might be inclined to help?
This is the correct answer. Given that this website is part of the 'civil society' sphere, it likely already gets taxpayer money from the State Department. They should go to their funders - be they public or private - and ask for help with their mission - I'm not sure it's appropriate to ask individuals for help.
Re: We are under attack
#15With a mission such as yours, I would think Cloudflare (or similar) protection is a must.
Re: We are under attack
#16I hate that this is happening, but isn't this something you have to expect/prepare for when your business involves controversy?
Not to mention when the people who don't like you have the resources of nation states.
Re: We are under attack
#17Move to OVH -- they offer free DDoS protection as standard, and unlimited bandwidth. I just moved to OVH after getting DDoSed. I'm paying $109/month for a quad core 3.7Ghz Xeon, 64GB RAM, dual 2TB software RAID. It's a pretty sweet deal, and I haven't had any problems so far.
Re: We are under attack
#18Sitting down and writing a blog-post seems a pretty laid back reaction to $30k/day in Amazon bills...
First thing I'd have done is take the site offline and call the various DDoS mitigation services (Incapsula, Cloudflare, etc.).
Pretty surely most of them would gladly pick up the slack here, given the free PR (possibly even in mainstream press) they get in return.
Re: We are under attack
#19It would be interesting to see which IP space the bulk of the traffic is coming from. Seems like it would be trivial for the Chinese government to spoof traffic from any IP within China...